by Forest Lewis

Rob Delaney is one of those few people who have become famous by mere virtue of his Twitter feed. He’s been named by Comedy Central as the funniest man on Twitter. I do not follow all the men on Twitter so cannot corroborate, but it is true that Mr. Delaney’s tweets are very funny.

On account of this newfound celebrity, Delaney has written a book ponderously titled Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. The book, quite plainly, is not funny. I’m very tempted to say it smacks of a bad use of one’s celebrity, but then again who am I to deny some #twitter #bro’s right to write a book? (I want to write a book too!) That job—the job of deciding who should and should not be published—belongs to a very special person called an editor. But aren’t some editors at the mercy of those who only want to move copies? Hmm.

The book, though only 190 pages, is ponderous. It is also at times quite inane and lacks generally those traits which make, say David Sedaris, so amusing and enjoyable: lightness, pacing, rhythm, economy, keenness of vision and so forth.

The interesting bits of the book are those that follow Mr. Delaney’s descent into alcoholism, his horrible exploits down in the drunken squalor, and subsequent recovery. His strength of voice in these sections is due to his sheer candor—no pretention, no bragging, no need for sympathy—he tells it straight. There are some harrowing and rather moving descriptions of a bad drunk driving accident and the aftermath of dealing with his shattered body and forced sobriety, but such gravity is rare, and there are a few too many pointless anecdotes along the road.

There is the anecdote of accidentally shitting in front of a Hasidic lady. The anecdote of a beautiful doctor staring into Rob’s asshole. The anecdote of bungee jumping from the Manhattan bridge. The anecdote of bedwetting. But all put down in so rote and unfeeling a manner as too evacuate all humor and interest. This is rather curious since his twitter feed is often hilarious. Some examples from the @robdelaney feed:

Before u step to a #ruckus situation, observe how effortlessly my powerful #buttocks carry me up a flight of stairs.

or

“What qualifies me to make love to your aunt?” *removes fedora and thick ponytail cascades out, interwoven with turquoise & silver charms*

and

You won’t laugh at my “dancer’s buttocks” when you see them propel my ham javelin into your high school sweetheart on 40 ft. screen.

It is my opinion that these fragments work. It’s successful humor. It works in part because they are fragmentary. David Foster Wallace explains this phenomena in his little essay Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed. “Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common,” he writes. “Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.”

This quality of exformation, this lack of vital information, is exactly why twitter works so well for Mr. Delaney and for comedy generally: because of compression and economy, because of its fragmentary nature. It is this same quality that the great haiku writers used so well, and I will defend twitter from its many detractors to the end of my days, proclaiming it as a true literary medium just because of its forced compression.

Unfortunately it seems then that Mr Delaney would have written a better book had he excluded that same ratio of information from its pages as he does from his tweets. But how does one do so? One does so intuitively. Mr. Delaney has written this book robotically.

Forest Lewis wrote this article for The Stake. Forest is a carpenter/writer living in Minneapolis. He writes a weekly horoscope for Revolver. Those can be found here.